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64 Human Rights, Values and Choice had in 1796 demanded expropriation of all land to be held in common, and were guillotined for plotting to overthrow the administration. In fact, there were arguments about communal ownership of land in 14th century Europe and similar debates in the mid-17th century between the army, the Levellers, the Diggers and other Utopian English thinkers. Such ideas were later to be found among Utopians throughout Europe. Indeed, Morellet had, as mentioned earlier, advocated common holding of property with abolition of private property in 1755. Well before the French Revolution, agrarian reform and communal land ownership were preached in 1775 by Thomas Spence and in 1782 by the Scottish advocate of land reform, William Ogilvie. Land reform brings me to perhaps the most influential advocate of human rights across the world, Tom Paine (1737-1809). Paine, using a different approach to land, went far further, although Spence reproached him for his conservatism. Paine put a fully reasoned case for redistribution of taxes to compensate the landless for dispossession. This he did in the second part of The Rights of Man published in 1792 and reiterated his scheme in Agrarian Justice, written in 1795-1796 while he was in France, but only published in 1797. Paine argued for most benefits similar to those now found in the modern welfare state. Foreshadowing Henry George's single tax theory, he even proposed a detailed negative income tax system in 1792 and again in 1797. Paine thought that charity would never suffice and that "it is only by organising civilisation upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed." 14 He was emphatic that such payments were a right, and not charity. Celebrating bi-centenaries is currently more than just a cultural fad. I hope that in 1991 the United Kingdom,
Concept of Social and Economic Rights 65 and not only America, will celebrate the life work of this unsuccessful exciseman once stationed at Grantham. Paine's influence in America and Europe was incalculable. Earlier, after emigrating to America in his late 30s, Paine had published a pamphlet urging a Declaration of Independence. Within six months that pamphlet had prepared colonial public opinion for the 1776 events. Paine later returned to England and promptly responded to Burke's attack on the French Revolution, by himself seeking to popularise human rights' ideas. His 1791 publication of The Rights of Man frightened the Government, as the book was broadly circulated amongst the populace. Within a couple of months of its publication in 1791, for example, Wolfe Tone was describing Paine's book as "the bible of Belfast." By 1802 over half a million copies were in circulation. But Paine played yet another role. There can be no other Englishman who was elected by three French constituencies simultaneously to be a member of the French Assembly, as Paine was in 1791. To avoid a criminal prosecution for his views in The Rights of Man, Paine fled to France and then helped the Marquis d'Condorcet (1743-1794), the leading French theorist and believer in state education and human progress to perfection, with the Girondist draft for the 1793 Constitution and Declaration. However, libertarian as ever, Paine ended up in prison for speaking in defence of Louis XVI, and was only saved from the guillotine by a mistaken identification and ultimate American intervention on his behalf. There are few writers whose books have provided a name for whole historical period, as did The Age of Reason, the second part of Paine's The Rights of Man. Two hundred years later his social ideas are still relevant and Governments need to consider something akin to his 1792 and 1797 proposals for a negative income tax system. Of course, in his own time Paine influenced not only the general
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THE AMLY LECTURES Forty-second seri
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THE HAMLYN LECTURES FORTY-SECOND SE
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THE UNITED KINGDOM AND HUMAN RIGHTS
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CONTENTS The Hamlyn Lectures vii Th
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viii The Hamlyn Lectures 1959 Judge
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x The Hamlyn Lectures 1985 Law and
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xii The Hamlyn Trust London, Leeds,
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xiv The Hamlyn Legacy Torquay. Will
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xvi The Hamlyn Legacy grandfather.
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xviii The Hamlyn Legacy realising a
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xx The Hamlyn Legacy and imaginativ
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2 The United Kingdom and Human Righ
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10 The United Kingdom and Human Rig
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12 The United Kingdom and Human Rig
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114 Values and Civil and Political
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190 People and Education for Human
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234 Education—cont. National Curr
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236 Relativism—cont. descriptive,
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Protection of the Public— A New C
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